An Intentional Gift

We discussed King’s insight into a pride in our creativity, and I want to further expand on that.

It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my creativity. I have always compared my gifts and talents with that of the next person, especially in high school where there really wasn't much weight put onto the arts, and where athletics took precedence (I was the kid who was picked last after the handicapped kid in P.E.—that actually happened). I wonder now where the encouragement was. Not just toward me, but toward the other students. Teachers never expressed a value in the arts. Sure, they did in a sense, but the moment a student told them that they were thinking of pursuing art or music in college or as a career, the room instantly felt chillier—I’ve watched it happen time after time. I never got that far. I never had that much faith in my talents, or maybe I didn’t have anyone to push me. In my mother’s eyes, I was always going to be a teacher. It usually went something like this: “You just don’t know it yet, Honey, but you’re going to be a teacher.” It’s funny, the other day, after discussing graduation plans, I told her (for the millionth time) that I WAS NOT going to be a teacher. For the first time, I think she really believed me.

I never believed in creativity, I guess. I still struggle with the fact that my major is some abstract, intangible idea of a profession. (“Oh, you’re a writing major? So, like, do you wanna teach?” I wanna punch you in the face, that’s what I wanna do.). I used to wish I was a nursing student or an architecture student or even an engineering student—something with a real job attached to it. It has come to my attention that maybe I think this way because I do not value my creativity. As I grow older, its becoming more and more clear to me that my gift of creativity is just as valuable as your gift of, say, grafting dead people for a living (no joke, one of my closest friends from high school grafts dead people’s bones and tissue, cleans them and packages them for “re-sale” and loves it…someone has to do it, I guess shudder). But without creativity, the world would stop spinning. We need creativity to think up new medical devices, to build new roadways and homes, to envision the future, and to rest the soul after we’ve saved the world.  

Maybe it was my self-doubt in my creativity, but maybe it was more-so the neigh-sayers. What about all these other ideas? Facebook, Google, Amazon…somewhere along the line, I can guarantee you that someone thought these ideas were stupid and useless, but thank God they weren’t ignored. What about Taylor Swift, for example? She got a lot of grief along the way for her work, but look at her now! She is on top of the world because she never quit or gave in to the neigh-sayers who thought she should be different.

I am reading a book on creativity called “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Gilbert made a point that ideas (or creativity) come beckoning you to accept them and turn them into something tangible because they cannot do it on their own. Sometimes you’re too busy with life and dramas and obligations to notice them knocking. After an idea bugs you for long enough, and to no avail, it’ll move on to someone who will accept it and bring it to life.

I think what it comes down to is not giving a sh*t what other people think. Someone out there is going to try to hold you down and keep you mundane and boring just like them. Rise above. We were given the gift of creativity not by chance. We were given this gift because Someone out there decided that we can handle it—its if we choose to handle it that matters.

 ~Grace

Nails into Spikes, Rejection into Redemption, Education into Profession

The section from King's On Writing that I struggled with the first time I read this and am still struggling with now that I'd like to explore is his discussion about rejection.

King gives us this brilliantly short memoir-style introduction into his life, and where writing fits into that, among the other mishaps and adventures he takes. On pages 39 - 41, King discusses his first rejection letter from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, in which he is told to never staple manuscripts. He promptly nails this to his wall, only to be followed by many, many others, and eventually replaces the nail with a "spike" (41). Jeez. I'm drawn to this hardworking, young optimism King portrays himself as in this scene, as well as the smarts and courage it takes to send stories into actual publications. I guess this is more of a reflection on myself than on King's actions, because this is NOT the kind of writer I see myself as. I've turned papers in to teachers, reports in to newsletters, and emails to various figures in my circles, authoritative and not, but I don't think I've ever submitted a story for review by a literary publication. My interpretation of this is that King just threw himself, head-on, into his writing. He had ideas popping into his brain left and right that he wrote and submitted. That's the process.

Um, what?

I've spent the last 15 years of my life in school learning to craft my writing. I've gone through major, major development in how I form and phrase my ideas. My writing has always revolved around the academic sphere, which I groaned and muddled all through middle and high school, but as a soon to graduate college student, I'm thankful for this focus, variety, and intensity of work. At the risk of creating an unnecessary distinction between "creative" and "academic" work (yes, I know, Doug, there is no real division there, even if I pretend there is), I've always enjoyed doing my own personal writing and journaling, though I've never created anything coherent beyond a few pages or a fully formed poem or two.

I'm okay with that. I'm not looking to submit anything.

I'm looking to communicate, to transport ideas back and forth, to translate information from one side of a company to their audience. I'm looking to innovate and inspire. I'm not looking for my name in lights, I'm looking to better my company and achieve a common goal as a team. Additionally, I'm looking to share my personal writing with others in hopes of connecting through vulnerability and real talk (ahem, Palmer). I'm not looking to go "viral" with my blog.

Just like King, I have stories that I want to tell and share, but how they are being shared and where they end up differ completely between the two of us. I respect our differences as writers (if I've learned anything from my time here, it's that there is no one right way to be a ~*~writer~*~ -- we are all too coddled in our special snowflake-ness to be forced into similarity), but I'm going to assert that I will become a successful writer due to my years of building a solid educational foundation about writing to enter the business world.

After writing this, I feel like King is probably snorting at me, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at me and grumbling, "Amateur. Who does she think she is?"

You know, he's probably right. And I totally respect his work habits and his writing. But, it's hard to read a book of this nature and not get defensive of my own views about writing. I'm not ready to view myself in any other way that I currently do as a writer, and I probably won't let that go for a while. So, I'm going to enjoy King, but argue for myself simultaneously.

Breaking it Down, Building it Up

I'm learning that I might have to start working backwards. I've been in contact with the girl who ran the very first Bozeman Monologues a few years ago, and I've been talking to her about production logistics. My Capstone project is slowly evolving (in my mind) into a deconstruction of each Monologue to decipher the writing techniques behind each, and then using those concepts to build research upon to come to a final proposal for writing therapy techniques to be used in the VOICE Center counseling services.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to interview past Monologues writers and performers about their writing process and how they were emotionally affected throughout and after the writing was done. I'm not sure how feasible that is, but I do know I can get in touch with the ones I know (which will also help me plan the production of the Monologues!!), so that might be a nice place to start.

The bulk of my project will just be doing research in order to create the proposal; I have no familiarity with writing as therapy, so I'm going into it basically blind. However, my time spent as a VOICE Center Advocate has taught me how incredibly healthy it is to speak out about a traumatic incident, and I'm hoping that writing will find its place in the discussion and healing that happens in those sessions. It's funny that writing my personal statement helped me solidify all of these different ideas. I learned that I want to study communications because I love connecting with people (duh), but I love working with others to help them achieve a goal. This has also resulted from my time as a Writing Center Tutor, and combining what I'm learning about one on one sessions with clients who are both working on their writing and who are battling the aftermath of a sexual assault has been so fascinating. Dialogue is fascinating. Healing, growing, and learning is fascinating. WRITING is fascinating. So, I want to combine all of that personal knowledge into a well-researched, legitimate proposal.

I guess I'm banking on the fact that because researching the Monologues is infiltrating both my academic and extracurricular work, it will naturally force me to continue to work on it. I'm not sure how to make it a set part of my schedule. Like I said in class, I don't work in time increments, I work in amounts of text, whether that be pages read or words written. I guess for this project, I'll need to think this same way in order to be productive. I'm thinking a combination of a certain amount of words/one article per week that pertains to the proposal? Any work I'm doing in orchestrating the Monologues will be naturally added on to that.

Now as I'm writing this, I keep looking back to Doug's suggestions for this post and reading the word "specifics." Ugh. I feel like as I write, things keep getting more and more broad as I try to imagine work that hasn't actually been done yet. However, I feel like I'm making a personal breakthrough in terms of my own investment in my writing, so there's that. Happy Wednesday from my brain-dead, candy-filled self!

Procrastination Destination With Discouraging Deviations

I did some research on this project, for another project in another class. The assignment was to find one scholarly article about a chosen topic and to write a brief overview of the article and post it to an online “poster board.” I figured I’d kill two birdies with one stone and get a head start on some researching for this class. After waaaayyy too much time looking for ONE article on the MSU psychinfo page and to no avail, I was more than discouraged from pursuing a 30-page paper on this topic.

With that said, I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. This semester has been a very productive semester for me. I feel as though I am inching closer and closer to where my future is taking me—it has just taken me a few hundred deviations. It seems like my graduate school programs of interest keep evolving, frustratingly. However, I can almost taste where I am supposed to be. First it was educational psychology, which morphed to school psychology when I decided I would like to do more hands-on work with students, then it briefly deviated to Literacy Specialization, but that quickly flew out the window when I realized that I did not have a teaching certificate that is required for admission to any Literacy Specialization program (I still think that is dumb). But I think I’m on to something—I have newly discovered the Reading, Literacy and Culture Ed.D. program at the University of Arizona. This program will give me the training I need to work in media literacy learning, whether I decide to go into policy making, researching, instructional practice or educational leadership. As of now, I am pretty set that this is the best choice for my future, though I’m sure there may be more deviations along the way. I am still tweaking my options and am open to suggestions, but as of now, I am closer than I have ever been before. With that said, I will be changing my topic from something that was more based in psychology and not as relevant to my future endeavors to something that is founded in education and will progress me toward my future goals. It goes something along the lines of: “How can we harness media literacy learning to the advantage of policy makers for the benefit of children?” >>Subject to change, as its pretty broad right now.

I am currently reading Tap, Click, Read by Lisa Guernsey and Michael H. Levine, which has been enlightening on the topic of media literacy learning, and will be an excellent aid in writing this massive paper. With that said, I guess I can say that I have already started preparing to write it. As far as continuing to prepare myself for the assignment, the only work I have done, beside reading (and highlighting important and relevant passages--thank you eReader!), is mentally preparing/terrifying myself about writing the damned thing. I’ve also had some nightmares...so there’s that, too. Also, I have been thinking ahead to December which makes me feel better because I will be pretty much done writing it. That is how I am staying sane, as of now. That last strategy works really well...

How will I end up weaving extra work into my time? I am not sure, but I think it will have to do with pressure. I thrive on stress. If my life is not stressful and I have nothing to bitch about, I find things to stress about. Congruently, if I have all the time in the world to work on a project, I won’t get it done until right before the deadline, however, if my work schedule and my school/homework schedule don’t agree, I will make time—even if it requires me to get up early. My next step is to pencil some time into my planner to sit down and dig in. If my planner is screaming at me in colored pen and highlighter on nearly every page, something will get done. But when…

Sunday. I will pencil it in for Sunday.

~Grace

Intimacy + Vulnerability = Productivity

I'd like to start by using a quote from class, from none other than Doug himself:

If you're gonna be a fuck-up, own it.

I get that there was some context to this quote, some situation in which we were referring to ourselves mid-project, but I like thinking about it without context. How do we define "fuck-up"? To what extent can we adopt and maintain this rebellious attitude before it becomes harmful? Who does it harm? Maybe the owning it comes in working with it instead of against it, embracing our quirks and using them as part of who we are as writers. Or maybe it means owning up to our mistakes, recognizing that if something goes awry it falls on our shoulders, and we gotta deal with it. Either way, I think it means that there is productivity in using who we are and what we have as writers, and that leads into my blog for today.

It's interesting that for this post, I'm thinking about my productivity in terms of my independent creative work instead of my scholarly or professional writing. I figured that all of the terms we mentioned about being productive would make me think about my homework habits or past projects... But all I can think about is my personal writing and the way maintaining routine and promising reward developed my comfort and appreciation toward vulnerability.

I joined a writing group with two friends last year, and we met every week to share our writing. Not only our finished, polished pieces, but our most intimate sketchbooks and journals. Our rawest and realest writing, put down into words and gobbled up. At least, that's what I did with the work I got to read... Full disclosure: I'm a ravenous devourer of others' writing. I'm dying to read what people are scribbling about in the corners of their notebooks.

Anyways, that consistency of weekly face-to-face meetings kept me producing constant content to have enough to discuss and share. Not only that, the quality of my content in terms of length and development of ideas, even in my free writing, truly improved.

The keys to our sessions being so successful were trust and organic growth. Trust in that we had to be willing to open ourselves up to each other, willing to share all of our writing, uncensored and open for discussion. We had to allow ourselves to just be ourselves, something that's a lot scarier than we realize when we are constantly striving to present our most polished versions to the world through our writing. Organic growth in that we started with no strict expectations of the group and let it go from there. We barely had a scheduled meeting time, let alone a word count requirement or a stage in the writing process we needed to be at. We came as is. We came with what we had, and what time we didn't spend writing, we spent in conversation (which is totally a part of the writing process!).

It shifted and flexed over time, growing into what we needed it to be-- our own extremely intimate space. I felt rewarded by the thrill I felt when one of them would stop over one of my sentences and hum with approval. I wanted every sentence to feel like that for them. I experimented with poetry, with song lyrics, with doodles. I wanted to capture their sense of delight in my words, wanted to save and savor that feeling. Perhaps that's where the productivity truly came from, then-- my direct and immediate contact with my audience in hopes of connecting with them through unique words.

Hmm... Amanda Palmer, anyone?

Vulnerability: something we won't stop talking about in this class, for good reason. I'm learning more and more (especially nearing the end of this blog post) that that beauty comes in the direct relationship between us and our audience, and the productivity comes from trying to find the work that will not only make us feel the most proud, but will connect with that direct audience. That's really, really hard to do, especially in personal and intimate writing, but speaking as someone who used to groan and cover my notebooks with both hands (who now craves sharing my work, mostly so I get to read everyone else's), I think that's where it needs to start-- shaping our free writing will inevitably shape our professional writing, and I'm excited to see where that direction will take me.